A database and its supporting website can get periodic makeovers and sometimes it can even undergo rebirth! The DOE Data Explorer (DDE) has just emerged from a rebirth process, and we are proud to announce its transformation. The first version of DDE was launched in 2008 with the mission of guiding users to collections of publicly available, DOE-sponsored data and other non-text information.

If you look closely, you can find fossilized material on the banks of the Norris Lake shoreline in Anderson County, Tennessee when the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) lowers the water level. If you are really lucky, you will find traces of sea creatures or beautiful flora or fauna impressions encased between the freshly exposed layers of rock. These are ancient treasures from our country’s rich geological history.

Eleanor Frierson, who passed away in April 2013, was the grande dame of partnerships to improve public access to federal and international science information. For 10 years, she helped spearhead U.S. interagency efforts to make federal science information more accessible to Americans, playing an absolutely crucial leadership role on the Science.gov Alliance. She took Science.gov all the way from a nascent concept through to its maturation. Ms. Frierson also made similar contributions to the international science portal, WorldWideScience.org.

During the past year, Dr. William N. Watson, physicist, of DOE/OSTI’s staff has posted quite a few very interesting white papers in OSTI’s monthly Science Showcase on OSTI’s Home Page. This quiet, unassuming man crafts prolific papers on popular science topics of interest to the Department of Energy (DOE). He investigates and assimilates this information from OSTI’s extensive R&D Collections and takes us on a layman’s journey through the technical details and scientific research that make it all possible.

William’s papers have helped us to understand key technologies developed at DOE Laboratories for the Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity and how chemical analysis of rocks and soil is determined millions of miles away. We know what is happening with new heat pump technology and how DOE researchers are working to improve designs and efficiency.

With the release of SciTech Connect, OSTI is expanding its deployment of semantic search, an innovative technology to improve the quality and relevance of search results across the majority of its DOE content. Semantic search is a way to enhance search accuracy contextually. Rather than relying on search algorithms that identify a specific query term, semantic search uses more complex contextual relationships among people, places and things. It is an especially effective search approach when a person truly is researching a topic (rather than trying to navigate to a particular destination).

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